16 Comments.

Love it. Creative puzzles with multiple solutions, and a Metroidvania that didn’t feel like a series of keys for a series of doors (even though in some sense that’s exactly what it was). The touch with the name in the beginning is cute, too. Stupid J name sure isn’t giving me any gameplay advantages, though.

It’s interesting that it lets you pick your starting letter. Going with a vowel or S will lead to a slightly easier/smoother game (though there are a handful of gates that require a specific letter, so it might not have all that much effect overall).

You still need to collect all letters, so it more determines how constrained you are at the start. A few letters can lead you to a no win state if you can fall past a certain gate without having first picked up the jump powerup.

Oh, that’s interesting. The name you choose gets added to the dictionary for that game (so that you can open that first passage), but that also means it can allow weird sequence breaks too. For example, if your name is “DUSELESS”, you can go to the right, spell DWELL, then DUSELESS, then DB (a word, apparently), and then get the J. Of course, then you’re stuck (because you can’t jump yet), but it’s a cool feature. It makes the question of what name is best for a “speed run” much more interesting.